After installing Mint 11 and Mint 14 Cinnamon today and completely striking out with both on trying to get my NVIDIA card to work with the proprietary driver like it did yesterday before my hard drive finally crashed... I thought I'd try Mint 14 MATE instead... But it won't even install.

Oh, wait... There *is* a screen after the one I was on... I forgot. When I had a few external 2TB USB drive attached, it kept insisting I use one of them as the target drive even though that is the *last* thing I'd ever want to do. I kept trying to select a different drive but the only drive that would ever appear in the select list was that one 2TB USB one. So I disconnected all of my external USB drives to prevent them from being displayed and that's when it wouldn't "Continue" after I clicked "Continue".

What gives? I'm now going to try the KDE Edition - although at this point I'm losing faith in Mint altogether for the first time since Bianca.

And that's not to imply that there was anything wrong with Bianca. That's just when I started using Mint. I'm, therefore, beginning to lose faith in Mint for the first time *ever* thanks to this nouveau / NVIDIA proprietary driver fiasco. I mean, seriously, give me a way to switch out what obviously doesn't work with my hardware so I can switch in what I know *does* work with it. Don't leave me unable to effectively use the entire distro. That's nuts.

I just got a Dell N5050 and have been unable to get past the screen where you enter name and password. I click continue and nothing happens, and soon all activity stops. This happened on several versions of Mint and Ununtu. Never had this happen before... I did manage to install Debian 6.0.6.

Yeah, I'm glad too because I put Mint 14 Cinnamon on my wife's new PC and it looks and runs great - but on my old PC with its "legacy" nVidia GeForce FX 5200 video card, Cinnamon is absolutely worthless - even without effects - after I bothered to learn how to uninstall nouveau and install the true nVidia 173 driver in its place. I ended up logging in with "Gnome Classic" and "Gnome Classic (no effects)" before I realized they're not worth my time either since it doesn't appear to allow panels at both the top and bottom of the display - nor can I even position my launchers where I want them on the one panel it does allow.

I then tried MATE and it wouldn't install. But now that I've tried it again and it went on as smooth as silk, I'm beginning to see that MATE is what I need on this machine. It *feels* as solid and reliable as my previous Mint 11 install which I've been hanging onto for the past 18 months while all the dust from this Gnome 3 / Unity nonsense has had time to settle a bit.

I'm actually going to have Mint 11 and Mint 14 MATE on the same drive for awhile as I gradually transition from the older to the newer. I'm thinking of linking my .mozilla and .thunderbird directories across partitions so they'll share the same data regardless of which OS I'm currently running. Not sure if that's doable yet or not due to potential permissions restrictions but we'll see. I've never tried that before. Sounds like it could be fun.